Quick tip: This single setting will dramatically increase your backup to the cloud backup speed

If you are a creative going both video and photos and amassing a huge amount of data you may have considered both a dedicated storage and maybe a cloud service.

Personally, I use a Synology 5 bay NAS as a second storage and Backblaze B2 as my cloud provider. The tip here is relevant for all providers of cloud storage though.

When I hooked up to B2, I already had about 2 Terabytes of data that I wanted to back up. Day to day operations should not be an issue, but getting that initial chunk of data up was something that needed consideration. I needed to get that data up there fast.

I hooked up my Synology box to an ultra-fast internet and started the sync. How fast? here is a speed-test screenshot, we were getting 824Mbps upload speeds. This is roughly 100MB bytes per seconds upload. Not too shabby. I plugged my Synology in and waited. I was only getting 2-3 MBps. what’s going on?

It took some time but I figured it out. It had to do with the number of concurrent uploads. The default is 3, which go me to about 2MBps. once set to 7 I got to around 5 and setting it to 20 got to a nice steady 12. This was happening because the Synology uploads files to Backblaze one by one and speed ramps per file. So with three files, the Synology kept starting to upload new files, which takes time to ramp up to speed.

Once I was on 20 concurrent files, there were enough files that were ramped up that the speed was constantly high. Mostly because there were almost always some bug files in the upload group.

This is how you set it up for the Synology, other apps may be different:

1. open the Synology CloudSync app.

2. Click the settings button

3. on the concurrent uploads select 20.

You are all set!

Now, mind you that if you are sharing a network with other computers, applying this setting will allocate more bandwidth to your Synology and your network will become slower.

Clinton Lofthouse is a Photographer, Retoucher and Digital Artist based in the United Kingdom, who specialises in creative retouching and composites. Proud 80's baby, reader of graphic novels and movie geek!
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